Just look at that movie cover…totally badass, right?

My buddies and I are working on a film project for my African Americans in Film course. I have a pretty intense interest in studying how African-Americans are portrayed in the horror genre. Unfortunately, there is very little scholarly work on the subject. What’s this have to do with you? Well, I convinced a few pals of mine to do our final project on African-Americans in horror films. We will be tracing the roots of how African-Americans have been shown, portrayed, and treated in horror films culminating with a special emphasis and in depth look at the niche direct-to-video black film explosion of the last 5 years. We’re going to be interviewing students, getting their reactions to scenes in these films, and finding out just exactly what they think of the stereotypes on display in these films.

Here’s where you guys and gals come in. As part of the film, we want to show a “history” of blacks in horror. So what we need are interesting characters, scenes, and films that we can use as source material. Now, some stuff is obvious, such as Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead, but we don’t want to focus just on the major ones. Minor roles are also important, especially in the early formulative years of the genre. The plan is to show multiple clips as part of the film so if there is any interesting scene or odd moment or anything that springs to mind, by all means, tell us what film it is and we’ll take a look. Right now, we’re trying to gather material to pour over so any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, we’re looking for high quality publicity stills, so if any of you know a good website to find those, please let us know.

And don’t feel as if you’re constrained by just old movies. If you want to point out a good moment in a classic Universal monster film, great! Got a great scene from Blacula that really made you think? Let us know! If something comes to mind from the 1990’s-post 2000’s, great! We’d love to hear them as well. So, if you have anything you think could help us, anything at all, visit this forum thread and start a discussion. Anything is fair game and you’d get a credit at the end of our film.

Thanks!

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